EPT
It’s a very strange thing indeed, to have grown up in an old, countryside-style house in the middle of nowhere when you’re expected to have all of the normal city-bred habits down. My walk home tonight featured a park wreathed in a dense fog, the gas lamps throwing almost exactly the wrong kind of light, turning the fog into a solid wall, whitewashed by the too-dim glow.
So, incapable of seeing more than ten feet in front of me, I wander away from the road and along the tiny pedestrian path. My father works in mapping, and as a child I still remember clearly the day I found out that roads and paths have names, rather than simply being, “the road that leads to my house.” I asked him then if the path that led through the woods to our house, and he confidently replied that some paths didn’t need to have names, because they were a little bit secret.
It was with that in mind that I wandered along the path, skirting the woods around the house, the dull, white-wall of the fog lining the road twenty feet to my right, hanging impenetrable and ominous, but at the same time, none of my concern. Instead, I glance up through the trees and watch the shafts of halogen white strobe through the trees, ink-black shadows fifty feet long cast by hanging branches and twigs thinner than a finger.
It’s strange to think that this is home, with its hanging pall of mist, every light around the house pointed away, so that in the night the house is pitch black, but looking out the window I can see the shining yellow-orange glimmer across the leaves that, somehow, haven’t fallen entirely from the trees despite our recent sub-zero jaunt.
The house itself is stranger still, a building in which no room has fewer than five corners, and no corner houses the husk of fewer than five arachnids. I often wonder just how the various different breeds of spiders that inhabit the house manage to die exclusively in the corners. There are webs enough in less claustrophobic portions of the house to indicate a fair amount of mobility, but it seems that they retreat to the confines of a room’s edges before whatever transformation takes place that turns a spider into a tiny shell.
I wonder sometimes if they even go there themselves. It seems as though by chance at least one might have died in the course of its day-to-day insect feeding business, but I’ve yet to encounter one thus disposed. It could well be the case that other spiders, worried that a corpse might give the impression that danger rests nearby, simply move the corpses from the more open webs.
I suppose, like the path that leads to my house, some things are just a little bit secret.
The big question is whether or not, having spent the vast majority of my life here, the same fate awaits me. Will I die some night, years from now in my bed, only to be carried off to a corner on a tide of tiny black legs, to be wrapped in a thick silk and entombed in a corner somewhere.
It might seem unlikely, but I’ve lived here longer than most; it seems to happen a sizeable proportion of the creatures that live in my house. It doesn’t seem too bad a way to go, really.
Still, now that the cold is out of the house, Spring is on the way again, and with it the spiders.
Black tide rising.
